The Consortium for Service Innovation’s annual Executive Summit is an invitational, discussion-based event for leaders of support and service organizations. This year it took place on 16-17 March.
We had a great group of strategic thinkers from almost 30 member companies join us for two days. Matt Seaman and I reflected on the Executive Summit conversations in the seven-minute video below.
Matt kicked off the Summit with a conversation about Leadership in a Complex Adaptive System. If we understand our organizations as truly adaptive systems, how does that change our understanding of the type of leadership required? How do we create an environment that nurtures a complex adaptive system? How do we do a much better job of nurturing ideas? There was much discussion about replacing the idea of support as being mostly transactional with the idea that support is mostly relational.
Maria Dwyer set some context about how DTCC is thinking about “the future of work” – a topic that many member companies are exploring as we start to move into the next normal. We talked about ways to mitigate the loss of serendipitous in-person meet ups and the need to facilitate cross-silo connections in a virtual world.
Matt Chinn from AARP talked us through their social care workflow, which sparked a great conversation about how to best engage and/or leverage social media when you can’t control the conversation or outcome, and another conversation about training knowledge workers on how to be empathetic.
On day two, Koree Mires from Cisco led us through some of the experimenting that Cisco is doing with automation, with the intent of improving the customer experience, removing known issues from the engineer workflow, and generating insights as to what is working or not, so they can be more predictive and pre-emptive. Koree reminded us that optimization is not innovation, and that we need to make room for experimentation if we want to come up with new ways of doing things!
Open Space sessions included:
- Employee Experience Journey Mapping – a way to path to next normal?
- How are operations and support teams tackling the move of key knowledge being held inside Agile / DevSecOps based product teams?
- How to use KCS + Intelligent swarming when you still need a call centre built on faster interactions?
- If our organizations are complex adaptive systems, as a practical matter, what should leaders do differently?
- How should we change measures to self-service and automation to show the “true” value to the business and the customer?
- Customer Contact centers in 2022: what do we envision them becoming? Hybrid, gone, saving money on facilities, hiring better people around the world?
- CSAT, NPSx, Customer Effort… what are best methods for measuring customer experience? Customer effort understanding and analysis: what approaches have been tried, what worked, what didn’t, what changed as a result?
Notes and slides are available in the wiki for Consortium Members. Thanks to everyone who participated in the Executive Summit; we are looking forward to follow up calls on many of these topics!